January 26, 2015

There was a time when Apple was my family's world. It went far beyond technology since the company wrote our paycheck. Before Steve came back, Apple was much like a family. I can remember going to a memorial service with our vice president of higher education when the son of my regional manager was killed in a car crash. I can also remember the same vice president showing up at my father in law's funeral.

Our vacations were sometimes even Apple sponsored. If you were good in sales at Apple, you could win a golden Apple sales incentive Apple trip. We took trips like that to Paris, London, Vienna, Ireland, Australia, Munich, and Canada. I once even loaded my family in our Previa van and drove across the country from Virginia so I could attend a higher education conference in Monterey, California. A key customer was going, my manager said Apple could not afford to fly me out so I turned it into a family vacation.

I usally wrote with a Cross pen that had an Apple logo on it. I had a number of Apple watches and of course as any Apple employee will tell you, I had an imposing stack of Apple t-shirts. It would have unusual to come home from an Apple event without five to ten t-shirts. When I wore a suit, it had a gold Apple lapel pen with diamonds in it. It was an Apple life that went well beyond the technology.

Of course the technology was also there. There were Apple modems then Apple Airports and Quicktake digital cameras and even Apple scanners. Of course there were faithful Apple LaserWriters and color Imagewriters. Our home networking started with AppleTalk connectors. We even had an Apple CD player and I once carried the Sony-Erircsson T68i cell phone which Steve Jobs demoed on stage in 2002.

Most impressive of all, I had an Apple Color LaserWriter. As a manager working out of my own house the Color LaserWriter shipped to me not long after it was first introduced. The 110 pound printer was shipped to my house and that same week one caught fire at Penn State which was one of my team's accounts. It was the beginning of the end of the Color LaserWriter. None of the reps wanted to deal with it after the fire so it never left my house until it became surplus. For years it was very popular with neighborhood children who needed color graphs for their science projects.

The Apple technology in house spread to several neighbors. There were programs for Apple employees to let neighbors and family buy computers at a substantial discount. We had many neighbors take advantage of it.

Some of those computers in the days of the Performas and endless model confusion before Steve came back were not that great. I can remember replacing a few. A few of the ones that that had Intel processors on a card were especially flaky. Fortunately laptops were so expensive in those days that I had no close friend buy one of the infamous Apple 5300 laptops.

When Steve came back, pieces of the Apple life and products started disappearing. The Newton which had become a favorite of mine while I was traveling got canned along with printers and everything but a few computers. The new focus was good because some very good computers came out of it, and I bought several of them for the family. I did that even after purchases for the family from Apple became less and less of a good deal with Steve choosing to also make money off of employees. I believe I bought seven or eight iMacs for the family over the years. There still is probably a lamp shade iMac in one of our children's storage areas.

Most people know that Steve was focused on technology but few understand how focused he was on making money. I believe the culture of making lots of money pretty well defines everything Apple does these days.

For me Apple has itself whittled away much of their technology that I counted on at one time. I long ago retired my Airports and went to better, less expensive wireless equipment from other manufacturers. Even before I left Apple, I ended up switching to HP laser printers. Where once printers worked seamlessly on Macs, now it sometimes not the case. From the day I got it over eight years ago my HP Photosmart 6180 has been a challenge on my Macs. The last two OSX upgrades I installed it would work for a week and quit. I recently installed it on my new I7 Lenovo desktop. So far it is working flawlessly which it has done on a number of Windows computers over the years.

However, my LaserJet CP1025nw color printer has worked well on my Macs from the start. I have also had good luck with a number of Epson printers from their Professional 4000 servies on down and with a Canon Pixma printer. Printing is one of those things you never know until you try it. It once was not that way with Apple. An Apple printer would just work because Apple made certain that it did. I like to think printers mostly disappeared because Steve did not like the mess of paper. I think it was 2004 when we got an edict from Steve that we could no longer hand out paper brochures or information in our booths because it made the booths look messy.

Of course there are some programs that needed to die and iWeb was one of them. Apple has also made changes that made my love of its products a short term affair. Other times they have made me sound almost prophetic. I published this in 2007.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given. Apple has done a really nice job there.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos. It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :) Of course I now have published photos in all three versions. I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums. If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

If you try the links, the only one that does not work after seven and one half years is the one to the .Mac web gallery. Given that who would you trust with your photos? Certainly not Apple. At one time we were surrounded by an Apple life and now we are not. As much as there might be some readers out there ready to comment (and do not waste your time, it will not be published) that I have a grudge against Apple because they showed me the door (which by the way is how almost everyone in Apple sales that I know left), that really is not the case. My Apple career rests on always stellar performance reviews and a wall full of sales awards. Read my book if you want more.

Most tellingly I have spent something over $7,000 just on Apple hardware products since I left the company in 2004. I bought an Aluminum Powerbook G4 within days of leaving. A few months later I bought my dual G5 and Apple monitor which I still have and cherish. I bought a MacBook which I loved in spite of some early faults (and a dead memory slot) and an iMac which has required a lot of love. I now depend on a MacMini which had a tough early life and has no more ports left to give.

That is basically $700 per year on Apple hardware over ten years for five computers. That does not include external hard drives both Firewire and USB, keyboards, mice, cables, and adapters. The G5 is still running but unsupported by Apple. The MacBook is dead. The Powerbook G4 is dead but could be fixed but it would require more money than it is worth. The iMac is retired because I just do not want to spend any more money on upgrading its storage and I am irritated by yet another incompatible version of Pages. Taking the iMac apart is not something I want to do again even if that did increase its storage.

I have spent close to that many dollars on Windows computers in the same ten years. The only one of those nine computers that is dead is a Dell laptop that I bought in 2004. I gave it away and someone sat on it in 2011. So when I said there would be no Apple under the tree, there were plenty of reasons behind that decision.

I look at what could be classed as my Apple addiction in the same light that I do the $2,220 that I spend annually with Time-Warner. It is an expense that I need to manage better. With Netflix, Prime Video, and some of the other options popping up this year, I hope to halve that Time-Warner expense and get the Apple expense down to under $100 per year.

Maybe life would be different if I had not bought an original Droid five years ago. There has never been an iPhone in my life. I recently upgraded to a Droid Turbo and love it for all the same reasons that I loved the first one, ruggedness, great mapping capability and very good phone reception. I am also tremendously impressed with the turbo charging. I only plug the phone in for charging while I am having breakfast in the morning. Of course I have to chuckle at the email I exchanged with an Apple employee recently over an almost unintelligible OSX message.

"...too much focus on iOS and yet my phone still keeps crashing and has a defective battery they will not replace."

With no iPhone (because they had very poor reception initially in our coastal area ), it was easy not to fall under the spell of the iPad especially since my children gave me an original Kindle Fire at Christmas in 2011.

We have come a long way since Apple was at the center of our world. Now on the edge of Apple's world, I am more disappointed in Apple products than anything. I have not given up on Apple products but I am in more of a holding pattern waiting for a product to convince me that there is still genius at Apple that will produce a product worthy of my money.

I will continue to look for software to make my MacMini useful. No software that has caught my attention recently like Coda 2 seems to come from Apple. Pixelmator will stay as my choice for a couple of very specific tasks for awhile. We will see if Pixelmator can survive my new found access to the latest and greatest Photoshop. I also have one website that requires RapidWeaver unless or until I change it. It is not a good sign that I have not upgraded to the most recent version Rapidweaver.

Most of the software I need comes with the Mac, and the rest is reasonably priced.

The next is the list of programs that I believed five years ago to be keeping me on a Mac.

"RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Fetch are the programs that keep me using a Mac. I also use Pages for one tri-fold brochure that I publish monthly. I am pretty sure that I could do it in Word, but I have never taken the time to try it. I could live without Pages."

It is funny how things have changed in five years. My Windows computers are the ones I count on now. They boot faster than my Mac and have done so for a long time. The famed Apple user interface consistency is not what it used to be. I would far rather use Techsmith's SnagIt on Windows than on a Mac. The user interface is better. The user interface is also better on Windows Mail 8.1. The iMovie user interface changes with every release and it seems that I have relearn it every time that I open it. We will not even get into the changes on Pages. The incompatible file formats are enough of a headache as Bregalad recently commented. When I am managing a lot of files or devices, I would far rather be using Windows 8.1 than a Mac.

I migrated my tri-fold brochure to Word long ago because the office printer I was using stopped supporting Macs after an upgrade. A few years after that I switched to a two-sided rack card that I now get Staples to print. I did have trouble printing the PDF proof of it last year from Pixelmator on a Mac and switched to Photoshop on Windows. I abandoned iPhoto and now Apple has it on the same chopping block that got iDVD. My sneaking suspicion is that things do not work as well on a Mac as they used to but other than anecdotal information, I have no real proof other than having to regularly reboot a couple of applications on my Mac. That never used to be a problem.

In the end many of those things that made me commit time and money to the Mac have disappeared. I bought my wife a Chromebook for Christmas. Her five year old HP laptop is still working but the battery life is not what she needs in spite of a new battery last winter. She loves her new Chromebook and I actually like it better than either of my tablets. I am amazed by the Chromebook's battery life, good screen, speed, and light weight. However, there is still an Apple IIe in a storage closet to keep the memories alive.

If computers are going to become disposable like Apple seems to hope, they need to be very inexpensive and I am not holding my breath for Apple to catch that wave. That is it from the Crystal Coast where we are on snowflake patrol while others are waiting for a potentially historic blizzard.

April 30, 2013

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite. I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books. I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics. I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur. I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools. I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products. By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar. I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac. I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it. The rest of my Mac experience is gone. I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite. iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me. I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty. I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner. It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue. The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform. Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish. There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad. While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform. I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need. I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud. I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies. I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform. I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change. Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone. I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future. I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly. Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform. If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs. I would rather have a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier. Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad. After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things. Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide. The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone. Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me. My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics. The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product. I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

November 02, 2012

My history with the Macintosh goes back to the introduction of the Macintosh. The Macintosh held such an important place in my life that I have managed to keep some first edition magazines announcing the Mac.

Yet here I am in November 2012 sitting at my October 2010 I5 iMac contemplating buying a new Windows 8 computer to completely shake up my computing paradigm.

I am thinking of jumping ship frankly because I think Apple worships far too much at the altar of design instead of functionality. I also believe there is no one with any sense left at the rudder when it comes to user interface decisions at Apple. And for icing on the cake, I don't believe the price Apple charges is justified based on my recent experience with Apple products.

For years I have operated on the theory that the safest computing involves doing my work on mulitple computers. While I worked at Apple, I often used my company supplied laptop with a desktop that I purchased. After leaving Apple in 2004, I bought my own Mac laptop and late that year a dual G5 desktop.

During the eight years since leaving Apple, for one reason or the other I have added Windows and Linux to my operating system world. Early this summer the MacBook I purchased in the summer of 2006 died in spite of a hard drive transplant. I moved to relying on my Lenovo I7 Windows 7 laptop and my iMac as my main two systems.

Unfortunately I quickly started having troubles with my iMac this summer. I ran it off an external hard drive for a while and eventually reformatted the internal hard drive and installed Mountain Lion. While I am not a big Mountain Lion fan, I thought that I was going to be okay until I started having hard drive problems once again the last week of October 2012.

It was only then that I started contemplating changing the internal hard drive in my iMac. I have replaced lots of drives in Macs over the years including a number in PowerBooks and some in other versions of iMacs. When I bought my Intel iMac, I paid no attention to serviceability since it had a drive with a terrabyte of storage. Other than the drive on my recent MacBook, I have only replaced drives for additional storage.

With all the cloud storage that I'm using I figured the terrabyte of storage on the iMac would be plenty so I didn't worry about replacing it. On top of that the iMac was not my first choice machine. I didn't really have another Mac choice. I would have preferred a tower, but there were no Apple towers in the same price range of the dual G5 that I bought in 2004 so I bought an iMac and hoped for the best.

As I started having problems with my iMac, an Apple system engineer that I know told me that replacing the drive in one of the new iMacs is very difficult. When I started investigating and found this video of pulling the front bezel and LCD to change the hard drive, I was amazed. It is a little like learning that you've bought a car and finding out that you have to pull the windshield in order to change the battery.

While Apple pioneered the All-One-Computer, most manufacturers make one now. However when I investigated recent systems by HP and Sony, I found that you access their hard drives from the back. The HP system seems to have a particularly easy way of replacing the hard drive. I have not been able to determine if the new SpectreONE AIO by HP suffers from the same design problem on hard drive servicing as the iMac which it appears to have cloned.

I'm sure that Steve Jobs did not want any panels opening on the back of the iMac, but to be honest, it is pretty stupid to build a computer which requires you to pull the most fragile component in order to service something like a hard drive. Just because other manufacturers might follow Apple doesn't mean it is the right thing for consumers.

Since I got my iMac, I have been very concerned that it produces a lot of heat. Given that, I was not surprised to find out that there is a sensor on the iMac drive which will shut it down if it gets too hot. I've never seen that on anything but 1U servers. It makes me wonder if the design of the iMac is a poor one and that hard drives in the machine will be prone to failure.

I didn't buy my iMac because it was stylish. I bought it because it was the least expensive way that I could continue to use a Mac with a DVD and a SD slot. In retrospect, I was too trusting of Apple's engineers and too willing to accept what Apple wanted me to buy. In fact I ended up buying the huge 27" screen because that was the only way at the time that I could get an I5 processor.

I would have preferred to have purchased an inexpensive Apple tower with a couple of drive bays. Apple has ignored the market for a product like that and forced us to choose between the MacMini, the iMac, and the very expensive Mac towers.

While the inaccessibility of the hard drive is a major flaw on the iMac, the proximity of the SD slot to the DVD drive is also a major design flaw. Of course Apple just fixed that by eliminating the DVD drive and moving the SD slot to the back of the computer. Does anyone seriously believe that having a SD slot behind a 27" monitor is convenient?

Beyond these hardware design issues, I am convinced that Apple has forgotten what made the Mac great. I have used Macs because they made my computing life easier. Increasingly I find that not to be the case. I think Apple's decision to mess with the "Save As" command might go down as one of the dummer decisions in the history of computing. As a writer, I cannot imagine what they were thinking. I am still smarting from the more recent versions of iPhoto abandoning the elegant return to the library command of the "Escape" key. Now I have to hit a button with my mouse.

Perhaps the final proof for me in Apple's quest to make their user interface less useful is the change that they have made to their Preview app when opening a PDF. If you remember from Mac OS X Lion, you could easily mail a PDF from the menu. If you have migrated to Mac OS X Mountain Lion, you will find that the option to mail a PDF from the menu has disappeared. Unfortunately mailing a PDF directly was one of my favorite Apple shortcuts.

Adding to the insult is that one of my favorite apps, Pixelmator, has obviously "downgraded" their app by replacing the "Save As" command. If has gotten to the point that I am afraid to upgrade apps because "Save As" will disappear.

I'm not sure if Windows 8 or Linux will be the answer, but I am increasingly convinced that Apple will not be part of the solution. Certainly my very positive experience with Windows 7 has given me the confidence to give Microsoft a shot at my desktop.